The Feast Day of St. Raphael

Tomorrow, the first Saturday in November, is one of St. Raphael's two feast days. The other, February 27, is the OCA's feast day for him, and takes place on the day of his death. This November feast is celebrated in the Antiochian Archdiocese, and takes place on roughly the day...

The many names of Chicago’s Russian church

Sometimes, we historians deal with big, important issues. Other times, we obsess over minutae. Today is one of the latter occasions. Chicago's OCA cathedral, known for the past century as Holy Trinity, had a lot of names in its early years. It's a pretty convoluted history, and I am attempting...

“Thank you; we have the original.”

Most of the time, on this website, we talk about the history of Orthodoxy in the Americas. But it's important to remember that, especially in the 19th century, American Protestant missionaries were traveling in the other direction, going to places like Greece and Syria in an effort to convert Orthodox...

The Reversal of Platon Rozhdestvensky

On today's podcast on AFR, we discuss the American Orthodox Catholic Church, an early attempt at multi-ethnic jurisdictional unity in the United States. One of the issues brought up was that, within about a year after the creation of the AOCC by Russian Metropolia authorities in February of 1927, the...

The Origins of the “Myth of Unity”

Back in June, I gave a paper at St. Vladimir's Seminary entitled, "The Myth of Past Unity and the Origins of Jurisdictional Pluralism in American Orthodoxy." The unwieldy title notwithstanding, the premise of my paper was simple: that the commonly-held story of a unified American Orthodoxy which fragmented after the...

The controversial Fr. Basil Bouroff

Yesterday, I wrote about St. John Kochurov's arrival in Chicago, which followed on the heels of Fr. B.A. Bouroff's expulsion by Bishop Nicholas, on the grounds that Bouroff had taken classes at the University of Chicago. But who was this Fr. Bouroff, and what was his story? As it turns...

St. John comes to Chicago, 1895

This past weekend, those of us on the New Calendar celebrated the feast day of St. John Kochurov, the Russian New Martyr and former priest of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago. With that in mind, I thought I'd talk a bit about St. John's arrival in Chicago. John Kochurov was...

Three bishops for America in 1870?

Yesterday, in my article on James Chrystal, I mentioned, "In 1870, there were various reports that the Russian government planned to assign a bishop to New York and offered the job to Chrystal. He declined, citing his opposition to icons." In the comments, Isa Almisry asked, quite reasonably, if I...

James Chrystal: the first convert priest

A month ago, I did a podcast and wrote an article about the first two American Orthodox convert priests, James Chrystal and Nicholas Bjerring. Today, I'm publishing a brief biography I wrote on Chrystal (and which I adapted for use in the podcast). James Chrystal was born in 1831, ordained...

Fr. Ambrose Vretta: the rest of the story

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Fr. Ambrose Vretta, the first parish priest of the Russian churches in both Chicago and Seattle. Toward the end of the article, I said, In December of 1896, Vretta was transferred from Seattle… And I’m not sure where he went. He was only...